In many lines of business, person-to-person interactions are critical. Each person brings with them a set of knowledge bases, skill sets, experiences, and understanding that is unique to them. Similarly, many tasks, be they human interactions or human-machine interactions, require a specific set of human knowledge bases, skill sets, experiences, and understanding that may be unique to a small set of people, and only partially possessed by a larger set of persons. Matching the specific person to the specific task in such a way that the individual and global degrees of mis-match in an organization are minimized is a challenge for management. However, effectively managing an enterprise by managing information via a Front Office application requires properly matched individual employees to take ownership for tasks such as service requests, sales opportunities, contacts, accounts and other entities.
In a service organization, service requests are often resolved by the first customer service representative who talks with a customer. However, this initial attempt at resolution may be far from satisfactory, and when the request cannot be resolved or when the service request is logged via the Internet, ownership must be transferred to a service representative who can give the appropriate attention and expertise to the request and provide a timely and complete resolution. It is time-consuming and ineffective to resolve ownership by frequent management intercession, or by simply yelling out a call for assistance in a telephone service center.
Likewise, in a sales organization, opportunities must be routed to the individual or team of sales reps and sales consultants who are responsible for following up on the lead. This assignment must be based upon such factors as product knowledge, knowledge of the customer, and, previous relationships with the customer. Moreover, this assignment must take place quickly and seamlessly so that sales reps can effectively respond to potentially revenue-generating opportunities.
Proper assignment means objects (as tasks, service requests, sales leads, or the like, which are referred to collectively and interchangeably as “tasks”) are allocated to the closest, most available, and most knowledgeable people or teams of people. Assignment may require either assigning employees or positions, that is a role within an organization that one or more employees are assigned to, to a task. Assignment is based on a wide variety of criteria including attributes of the employee or position (e.g. telephone status, calendar availability, workload) as well as matches between the attributes of the task and attributes of the employee or position (e.g. product skill, language expertise), and matches between attributes of the task assigned (e.g. Opportunity, Service request) and a pre-defined set of enumerated attribute values.
Employees have expertise on certain products and possibly specific product versions and upgrades. This expertise changes over time as employees gain new skills and experience, and as new products are released. Maintaining and providing an up-to-date skills matrix or database in the system is critical for both service representatives and the automated assignment processes, both of which need the most complete product information for determining who should handle service calls. Assigning service requests to people without product expertise causes customers to lose confidence, employees to become frustrated, and for service center productivity to decline.
For assignment of critical or important tasks, knowing employee availability is also critical to ensuring a task does not sit idle while someone is unavailable. Agent availability can include the current indicated availability (vacation, lunch, etc.) or the telephony availability (talking, wrap up mode, etc.)
Overloading any service representative with too many work items leads to longer resolution times for those work items. Taking into account an existing workload before assigning tasks can provide better load balancing, and therefore more predictable turnaround times.
Lastly, because of the complexity of tasks in a service or sales organization, which require the efforts of more than a single individual to resolve, assignment of tasks may be to teams of persons (employees or positions) For such type of assignments, known as team assignments, a primary person is calculated by assignment manager, by means of scoring the closeness of the match of each assigned person to perform the task at hand, and selecting the closest matching person as the primary person on the team.
For field service representatives, assignment includes scheduling. Once the optimal employee is assigned, the visit may be scheduled on his/her calendar.
In order to accomplish these ends, a clear need exists for an assignment manager method, system, and program product to optimally or sub-optimally match resources with needs and opportunities in a constrained environment, for example, to match resources, such as employees with specific skill sets, with customer, client, and sales lead needs and opportunities.
There is a further need to carry out matching in a constrained environment where finite resources, including employee skill sets and product expertise, and employee workload and availability constrain the assignment or matching process.
Thus, there is a clear need to carry out assignment matching in a “Rule Based” system that balances resources, needs and opportunities, and constraints.